all the people and all Israel Not only David's own subjects in Judah, but the people of the northern kingdom, who must have been specially aggrieved by the murder of their hero, recognised the sincerity of David's grief, and acquitted him of all complicity in the act. If, as seems probable (2 Samuel 3:26), Joab had abused the king's authority in order to bring Abner back, it was doubly necessary for David emphatically to repudiate the act, lest he should have been thought to have had some part in instigating it.

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